Be Nice To Yourself

Sunday, January 12, 2014

By bsoule

I originally wrote this as a
beemail
and everyone seemed to love it, so I’ve blogged it for the rest of the world to see.
I do realize how vaguely self-serving this advice is. [1]
And perhaps hard to generalize to people who are not founders of Beeminder.
But it works for me!

With the new year, and bunch of people resolving to better themselves, and turning to us to reinforce that resolve, I want to suggest to you all that you should remember to be nice to yourselves.

Don’t beat yourself up for paying Beeminder pledges!
I think of it as a way to make my value for various behaviors crystal clear. [2]

If I have $10 pledged on my
running goal
and it is an eep day and I still don’t feel like running, I can decide to pay $10 and get out of it.
Cool!
I’m no longer badgering myself about how I “should” go, or about how I’m going rogue on past me who decided that the optimal time to run would be tomorrow.

“How much do I value not running right now?”

Instead it’s a simple decision: how much do I value not running right now?
If it is less than $10 then I’ll run.
If it is more I’ll pay.
If I get up to $90 pledged and I still don’t want to go running, then I will re-evaluate why I am trying to get myself to run in the first place. [3]
If it is a really good reason, then OK, let the amounts continue upward.
Sometimes, however, I might realize that this goal is stupid and I don’t want it anyway.
Then I can just hit Archive.

Ideally beeminding stuff isn’t just another punishment you heap on to an already critical inner monologue.
Allow us to ease that burden.

Footnotes

[1]
Yes, as a cofounder of Beeminder, I own something like 40% of the company, so paying Beeminder $90 is
literally
equivalent to paying closer to $50.
Some
of our meta goals are
paid directly to users.
I’d actually love to have the pledges on all my personal goals go to users (I just need to work out a fair distribution mechanism).

[2]
Or as one Beeminder user put it:
“I class all Beeminder expenditures under ‘finding out how expensive it is to achieve my goals’.
I might be surprised by how expensive a certain goal is, but that has nothing to do with you!”

[3]
In the case of running, it has lately been the
NYC triathlon
looming in the summer that is the reason I want to have been running.
At other times it has been some nebulous desire to be the kind of person who likes to run, and I ultimately decided that was not a very good reason to do something I don’t enjoy and pay for it.

Start Here

Does Beeminder sound super crazypants? Just confusing? One of the first things you may want to check out is our User's Guide for New Bees. Check out other posts we're most proud of by clicking the "best-of" tag below. If you're a glutton for honey, the "bee-all" tag has everything we still think is worth reading. Other good ones are the "rationality" and "science" tags, if you're into that.

Akrasia

Akrasia (ancient Greek ἀκρασία, "lacking command over oneself"; adjective: "akratic") is the state of acting against one's better judgment, not doing what one genuinely wants to do. It encompasses procrastination, lack of self-control, lack of follow-through, and any kind of addictive behavior.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia